International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War hold an international meeting every second year. Dr Peter Underwood, a physician from Perth, attended their last conference, which took place in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. He talks about his experiences and impressions during his stay in this city, which suffered the blast of an atomic bomb 67 years ago.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: How about a peaceful Christmas? Sounds somewhat old-fashioned in these troubled times doesn’t it? But we’ll have a go anyway.

Dr Peter Underwood is a physician based in Perth, who’s long had international interests. He’s talked about them many times on this program. He also comes from a very distinguished family of scientists, and now he’s inducting the next generation to take over – in a peaceful way. Dr Peter Underwood:

Peter Underwood: Every second year, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War hold an international meeting, this time the venue was peculiarly fitting – Hiroshima. This group is the parent of an Australian organisation, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War. MAPW is a group of doctors and health workers who consider that war and violence are a foremost and neglected cause of death and illness. Because we are charged with easing human suffering and disease we believe that working for peace is simply part of our job.

The time and place seemed so resonant I decided to ask my 13 year old grandson to come along with me. He proved a beautiful and thoughtful companion. Before long I realised that I was seeing the richness and the suffering of our human family through a set of eyes additional to my own – and they were so tender.

We had begun our journey in Vladivostok, Russia and then, via Korea, taken a ship to Japan. So, one morning 12 days after leaving Perth we found ourselves on our way to the day’s conference, walking through the bustle of that extraordinarily lively, sparkling new city of Hiroshima.

The conference was held in the Peace Park; it had been sited over the epicentre of the blast of the atomic bomb detonated 67 years ago. The bombed dome in the centre of the Park has become an icon known around the world.

Before we arrived we knew that this experience would prove powerful. Yes, this and Nagasaki are the only places where a nuclear weapon had been used against a human community. But as soon as the conference got going we saw that this singular poignancy had just been given a new twist – Fukushima. Now Japan had been doubly and uniquely traumatised by that weird power unleashed by our newfound capacity to sunder the tiniest pieces of matter.

To my surprise it was this latter tragedy that came to dominate the conference. Yes, the threat of nuclear weapons, the original raison d’etre of our organisation is more acute than ever and so the urgent need for the international community to remove its head from the sand and begin the process of banning such weapons. But in the face of the catastrophe of Fukushima, nuclear power is emerging as a second and most terrible ghost. This too, directly endangers our human community and risks all that allows humans to live.

The epidemiologists had done their stuff; we learnt the roll call of diseases that shadowed those who had been lucky enough to survive the fireball and the radiation of the bomb of 1945. These are hauntings that will never go away.

But they also told us a similar story about Fukushima. Here was a peculiar irony; so good were these medical accountants that they could tell those new survivors exactly how much their life would be shortened and by what diseases. If an older adult decided to return to their home in the still radioactive zone, their life expectancy would be reduced by a mere 1.4 years. It was no surprise that an increasing number of older people had opted to return. Yes, a shorter life, but one where they could spend their last days in the place that they, their parents and their children had called home and from which they had been so cruelly expelled.

Towards the end of the conference a Swiss physician brought these two strands together. With cool logic he demonstrated that the argument for nuclear power is fatally flawed. When all costs of production are counted the final cost is prohibitive and soaring; mining and transport of uranium are dangerous to health at every level; the safe storage of spent products is unsolvable as is the issue of terrorism and the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is proven. As he sat down, composed, very Swiss the audience erupted with applause and 80% of the audience were Japanese, a group usually as restrained as the Swiss. The Japanese people now know what happens when Einstein’s equation, whereby a bit of mass becomes a vast quantity of energy, is let loose.

As a consequence the international physicians confirmed that explicitly, alongside nuclear weapons, our organisation opposes nuclear power. Neither is good for your health.

My grandson and I decided that we would leave our visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum until the end of our 5 day stay; we felt we would take it all in, but step by step. So on the day before we left we took our usual walk to the Peace Park and Museum. We dawdled beneath some towering trees, loud with cicadas and crossed the lovely river that adjoins the park. There was a little garden on the other side, we had often passed by but never looked into it.

This time, perhaps feeling daunted by what we were about to learn of human’s capacity to hurt each other, we meandered towards the garden. At once my grandson was caught by something; it was an adornment of paper cranes tucked back in the bushes. He knew the story of the peace cranes and how a young girl from Hiroshima had started making them and her idea has spread.

We found a stone plaque beside a little monument. The plaque explained that this had been the site of the Hiroshima Girls School. At the blast pupils and teachers had been awaiting the start of lessons – they were incinerated. On the stone monument with its festoon of rustling cranes was one simple inscription E=MC 2. Why? - We wondered.

Nearby we discovered another plaque. It told us that soon after the blast the relatives of the pupils had wanted to construct a memorial. However the American authorities at the time refused to allow any mention of the atomic bomb. So the survivors had come up with an idea. They would fashion a memorial but on it place only five symbols; Einstein’s equation. They thought that the meaning would be clear enough to those who wished to see and they’d got away with it.

Once more back in Australia I struggle to understand those who wish to start mining uranium and, hiding the truth of its dangers, set it off on its toxic way to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. For the shortest of short-term gain we are to be placed on a road from which we cannot get off and which leads to disaster. Siting a nuclear power plant on an earthquake zone is not a good idea, but neither is sending uranium to India, a country which still cannot feed or safeguard its people and is intermittently at war with its neighbour, nuclear-armed and out of control. A 13 year old can see all of this – how strange that Prime Minister Gillard and Premier Barnett cannot.

I will send them this little poem of mine. It was born through the sweet gift of another person’s pair of eyes, those of a child, the very same that saw a piece of paper as a bird of peace and the same that looked out and realised that the Emperor had no clothes.

Coming back to Oz.

Twenty five million died in Russia in World War II

And the Hiroshima Girls School had 727 pupils at 8.15am on August the 5th, 1945.

None after

Who wins the football

Is not the whole story.

We did go through the Peace Museum and one photo caught my attention. Near the centre of the blast, amidst a devastation beyond words, could be seen the odd, blackened remains of a few trees. Sticking up like ghastly signposts they appeared to be mere bits of charred wood. But I remembered one of the presenters at the conference; Nassrine Azimi had started a project called Green Legacy Hiroshima. You see some of those seared trees not only survived as wood, they survived as trees. They lived and they had seeds. She and her colleagues had collected them and from them grown new trees.

Then I remembered something else – to an Australian something so wonderful to be almost incredible. One of the handfuls of surviving trees had been one of ours. It was a yellow box Eucalyptus Melliodora, a native of the Great Dividing Range. I decided we were going to obtain some of the survivors’ seeds. We will plant them here in Australia. Alongside we will explain their story. And I will enclose a couple of these seeds together with my poem sent to Messrs Gillard and Barnett. They might yet come to see that in these seeds of hope from trees of survival is where a good future lies.

Robyn Williams: Trees for survival from Dr Peter Underwood in Perth. He’s been an Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University.

Next week, in time for Christmas, Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, talks about celibacy and the church.

Guests

Professor Peter Underwood

Vice President of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia)Honorary Research FellowUniversity of Western Australia